''Roger Scruton, High Priest Philosopher of the Libertarian Right, Defrocked and Exposed as 'Grimy Hack' for Tobacco Industry.''

This headline on a news release from a British anti-smoking group gives a flavor of the glee with which the British left and parts of the British press greeted recent revelations that the conservative philosopher and commentator Roger Scruton had been on the payroll of a tobacco conglomerate and had offered to publish articles in prominent publications attacking efforts to restrict smoking.

These are the basic facts. Two months ago, The Guardian published a leaked e-mail memorandum that Mr. Scruton and his wife, Sophie, sent to Quentin Browell, an executive at Japan Tobacco International, which sells numerous brands of cigarettes, including Camel, Winston and Salem. In the memo Mr. Scruton offered to orchestrate a major pro-smoking publicity campaign and urged that his monthly retainer be increased to 5,500 pounds (about $7,800) from 4,500 pounds (about $6,400).

''We would aim to place an article every two months,'' the memo stated, mentioning as possible publications The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Independent and The New Statesman. ''While one or more of these articles might be written by R. S.,'' the memo continued, referring to Mr. Scruton, ''we would do our best to get other journalists to join in.''

The Financial Times responded to the article by dropping a weekly column on country life that Mr. Scruton wrote for it. The Wall Street Journal, for which Mr. Scruton has written frequently, also said it was suspending his contributions for the indefinite future.

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Mr. Scruton insists that he has been the object of a smear campaign to silence him. ''This can be made to look like a scandal only because the private document was not phrased as carefully as it would have been, had it been intended for public discussion,'' he wrote in a response published by The Guardian. ''The real scandal is that it should have been stolen and used as part of your 'shut up, Scruton' campaign.''

Whatever the case, it is the latest and perhaps most bizarre chapter in the career of one of Britain's most prominent public intellectuals, a former philosophy professor, amateur composer and novelist who has written books on Kant, music theory and the aesthetics of architecture. Mr. Scruton is also one of the leading intellectual champions of the contemporary British conservative movement.

Mr. Scruton, who taught philosophy for years at Birkbeck College of the University of London, was a co-founder in the 1970's of the Conservative Action Group, which helped pave the way for Margaret Thatcher's election as prime minister. His withering criticism of contemporary architecture is thought to have inspired Prince Charles, who conducted a public crusade against modern building practices. A self-avowed elitist, Mr. Scruton has published books including ''The Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy'' and ''The Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture.'' He has also gone out of his way to cultivate controversy and champion unpopular causes, speaking out in favor of fox hunting, the fur trade and sexual taboos, while attacking feminism, ''narrow-minded'' liberalism and political correctness.

Because Mr. Scruton is a longtime proponent of the free market and a critic of government regulation, it is not entirely surprising that he would support smoking and cigarette manufacturing. In 2000 he published a 60-page pamphlet for the Institute for Economic Affairs, a British think tank, attacking the ''transnational authority'' of the World Health Organization in its effort to ban cigarette advertising worldwide. ''Who or what is to control the bureaucrats appointed to control us?''' he asked in an editorial he published a year and a half ago in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal. ''The W.H.O.'s main project for the coming year is to press for legislative measures, imposed from on high by bureaucratic bullying on nations, many of which depend on tobacco for their livelihood, to restrict the market in cigarettes.''

But Mr. Scruton did not inform either the Institute for Economic Affairs or The Wall Street Journal that, three years ago, he began receiving a salary from Japan Tobacco International to do public relations work. Last month, an editorial published in both the United States and European editions of The Journal said that ''Professor Scruton -- a free-marketeer with well-known views -- was a contributor for us long before he took a dime from Big Tobacco, but our longtime standard is also that such financial ties should be disclosed, so readers can make up their own minds.''

Although his stand in favor of tobacco was consistent with his past views, his arrangement with Japan Tobacco International appeared at odds with his frequent invectives against the commercialization of modern life. ''Something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world -- a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything -- virtue included -- on sale,'' he wrote in ''The Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture.''

In his memo to Mr. Browell, Mr. Scruton asked for a raise in his monthly fee, saying, ''We think that we give good value for money in a business largely conducted by shysters and sharks.''

After initially insisting that he had done nothing wrong, Mr. Scruton recently admitted in an article in The Spectator that he should have been more forthright about his economic relationship with tobacco interests. It was not greed, he maintains, that led him into the arms of big tobacco but a desire to save his family farm and, by extension, rural life in England.

He explained that his status as a ''well-known conservative scapegoat'' meant that ''only two kinds of clients could possibly make use'' of the consulting business he started with his wife: ''those whose business was regarded as politically incorrect, and those who had not got their arguments straight.'' Under these circumstances, he wrote, he and Japan Tobacco International were, he said, a ''perfect match.''

''No better luck could be imagined, in the life of a poor pariah,'' he continued, ''than a rich pariah who needs his help.''

Mr. Scruton's company, Horsell's Farm Enterprises, organized meetings and news briefings for the tobacco industry that made it clear that he was working for tobacco interests, but in his role as a journalist, he failed to reveal the connection. ''With hindsight we can see that we ought to have referred to our consultancy agreement wherever and whenever we could, even at the risk of losing our contract,'' he wrote. ''However, after a year or so, when the briefings and the meetings had fixed themselves as open-minded institutions, whose purpose was not to advocate but to clarify, we felt that we had sufficiently established the legitimacy of our business.''

Oddly, both Mr. Scruton and the tobacco industry have run afoul of a social mechanism that Mr. Scruton has often praised: the use of shame and social stigma to enforce cultural norms. In an essay titled ''Bring Back Stigma'' published in 2000 in the journal of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a think tank, he wrote in praise of a time when ''the genial pressure of manners, morals and customs -- enforced by the various forms of disapproval, stigma, shame and reproach -- was a more powerful guarantor of civilized and lawful behavior than the laws themselves.''

Now it appears that it is Mr. Scruton who is feeling the ''genial pressure'' of ''stigma, shame and reproach.''

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